Missing in action: Service members left behind
By: Austin Wright February 8, 2012 10:26 PM EDT

With U.S. combat troops out of Iraq and a time frame for a pullout set in Afghanistan, an ominous question looms: Who will we have left behind?

In Iraq, at least one U.S. service member is currently listed as missing, along with three defense contractors. And in Afghanistan, an Army sergeant is believed to be captured by the Taliban.

“Even if there’s only one, that’s one too many,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who for years has advocated better accounting of America’s lost service members.

Since 1993, King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing for legislation that would establish a panel to investigate the handling of missing-in-action and prisoner-of-war cases from past conflicts. The latest iteration of his bill is stalled in the House Rules Committee.

King is especially concerned about World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, which together claim more than 83,000 unaccounted-for U.S. service members, according to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

“It’s never been the political issue during either of the Iraq wars or in Afghanistan the way it was in Vietnam,” he said in an interview with POLITICO. “It was such an emotional issue for so many Vietnam veterans, and I believed a full investigation was required.”

Asked why his bill hasn’t gained traction, King said Pentagon officials oppose it. “They feel it would open up too many sensitive records,” he explained. “I feel that there are enough serious questions that they should be opened up to finally resolve them and that there are so many veterans who feel so strongly about this.”

The issue has also drawn the attention of Rep. Richard Nugent (R-Fla.), whose three sons all serve in the Army. The freshman congressman introduced a sense-of-the-House resolution in December, urging all U.S. service members be accounted for in Iraq and Afghanistan as the military missions there wind down.

“The warrior ethos says we never leave a man behind,” Nugent said on the House floor in December. “And I call upon the president, and I call upon this great body, to make that same statement that we will never leave a man behind, that we will do everything in our power to make sure that we get these kids back home.”

It’s likely easier said than done.

The Pentagon’s missing personnel office is tasked with identifying and bringing home those killed or lost in past conflicts. The office is able to find and identify the remains of about 80 service members a year — most recently, several Korean War veterans missing for over a half-century.

One of those veterans, Army Pfc. George Porter, was taken prisoner in 1950 after Chinese forces attacked in what became known as the Hoengsong Massacre, the missing personnel office said in a news release. He had been missing since.

But Porter’s DNA and identification tag were recently discovered among 208 boxes of remains that North Korea gave to the United States in the early 1990s. The boxes are believed to contain the remains of 200 to 400 U.S. service members, and the process of identifying them continues.

The Pentagon announced last month that U.S. efforts to recover the remains of the more than 5,000 soldiers believed to be missing in North Korea would resume this spring — following a seven-year hiatus sparked by tensions on the Korean peninsula.

An official at the missing personnel office emphasized that the efforts are purely humanitarian and the decision to restart the search in North Korea is not related to any political issues. The official, who insisted on anonymity, added the office is working to upgrade its technology in order to reach a congressionally mandated goal of 200 recoveries a year.

The office, which doesn’t handle ongoing conflicts, assumed responsibility for Iraq last December and will do the same in Afghanistan, once the U.S. military mission there has officially ended — unless, of course, all U.S. service members are accounted for by then.

“We would only take over Afghanistan assuming that there are still missing individuals when operations are completed,” the official said. “We’re proceeding on the assumption, with optimism, that we won’t need that responsibility in the future.”

The soldier believed to be captured in Afghanistan, Bowe Bergdahl, 25, went missing in 2009 and has since appeared in a series of videos released by the Taliban, showing him in captivity, alive but frightened.

On Tuesday, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) blasted reported negotiations between the United States and the Taliban to swap prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl — a development recently cited by NPR and several other news organizations.

“You cannot allow that precedent to be established,” said West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “The next thing you know, their goal is to get an American aid worker or anything to continue down that path.”

Instead, West told POLITICO, the U.S. military should “tear that country apart to find Bowe Bergdahl.”

In Iraq, the U.S. soldier officially listed as unaccounted for, Army Staff Sgt. Ahmed Altaie, went missing in 2006. He was reportedly abducted by gunmen while visiting his wife in Baghdad, according to a December Military Times account.

Altaie, considered “missing-captured,” was born in Iraq but moved to the U.S. as a teenager. The U.S. government has offered a reward of up to $50,000 for tips leading to his discovery.

“We have fairly good information that tells us where we think he could still be held and who perhaps may have him,” Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, now the commander of U.S. Army North, said in the 2006 Pentagon news release that announced the reward. “We are not going to stop looking until we find him. We’re just not.”

More than five years later, Altaie’s case remains unsolved and has been turned over to the missing personnel office, along with those of three missing defense contractors: Kirk Von Ackermann, lost since 2003; Timothy Bell, lost since 2004; and Adnan al-Hilawi, lost since 2007.

Investigators spent the past two months reviewing files and crafting plans for how to proceed on each case. “It’s a lot of reading through records of various things that have happened in the past and putting that all together,” said the official at the missing personnel office. “It’s like detective work.”

The office holds meetings throughout the country to update family members on efforts to locate their loved ones. A recent gathering in Tampa, Fla., was attended by 137 family members representing 64 unaccounted-for troops — the vast majority from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

“We are fulfilling a promise that’s made to all service members,” the official said, “which is that they won’t be forgotten.”